Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep

By Michael Lewis

Published: December 4, 2005

CORRECTION APPENDED

7:02 . . . 7:01 . . . 7:00 . . .

It was still ordinary time. The seconds ticked off the digital clock on the locker-room wall. A smell: the acrid odor of vomit. They were still ordinary college football players, and a few of them had lost their pregame meals to a war of nerves. Side by side at their lockers the players sat, silently, almost penitently, stomachs churning, waiting for their coach to show up and to make the place a lot less ordinary.

A muted roar from the other side of the thick concrete walls: that would be their mascot, Texas Tech's Masked Rider, a man on a black stallion galloping across their home field. The governor of Texas, a graduate of Texas A.&M., Texas Tech's opponent this evening in early November, was just now finding his seat, along with the biggest crowd ever to watch a football game in Lubbock. The governor would be rooting for the other team, obviously. It could be worse, and had been. Two years before, when Texas Tech played Navy in a bowl game in Houston, the president of the United States, a Texan, was rumored to be in the stands rooting against them. ''We aren't exactly America's team,'' Texas Tech's head coach, Mike Leach, said.

2:51 . . . 2:50 . . . 2:49 . . .

A sound: of surgical tape ripping, as Texas Tech's quarterback, Cody Hodges, affixed to his wrist a piece of laminated paper listing all the plays he might run tonight. Four years ago, Hodges was a high-school senior with just one other offer to be a college quarterback, from the University of Wyoming. Now, two-thirds of the way through the 2005 N.C.A.A. football season, and with a throwing arm so dead that he required a cortisone shot to move it, Hodges was the nation's leader in yards passed, total offense and touchdowns. Three weeks earlier, against a competent Kansas State defense, he threw for 643 yards and, had Coach Leach not pulled him in the fourth quarter, might well have broken the N.C.A.A. record for passing yards in a single game (716).

A lot of the players in the locker room had similar stories of rejection and redemption. In this part of the country, the University of Texas and Oklahoma University are the old-money football schools, with Texas A.&M. right behind. Those schools fish first in the local-talent pool. Tonight there would be very few players on the field for Texas A.&M. -- for Oklahoma or Texas there wouldn't be a single player -- to whom Texas Tech would not have offered a football scholarship. Conversely, the Texas Tech locker room was filled with players rejected by the old-money schools. And yet -- look around! Hodges led all of college football in passing. The team's tailback, Taurean Henderson, had broken the N.C.A.A. career record for most passes caught by a running back. The top four receivers on the team were the four leading pass receivers in Texas Tech's league, the formidable Big 12.

At least one N.F.L. head coach had taken a special interest in the Texas Tech offense and had been ordering its game tapes on Monday mornings. At least one N.F.L. defensive coordinator, Jim Schwartz of the Tennessee Titans, had stumbled upon Texas Tech accidentally and said, Oh, my. The surprise runner-up in the search earlier this year for a new San Francisco 49ers head coach, Schwartz had scrambled to answer a question: if he got the 49ers job, whom should he hire? He was just in his mid-30's, and his football career stopped at Georgetown (where he graduated with honors in economics), so he really hadn't thought about this before.

The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz's view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart? Notre Dame might have a good football team, but how much of its success came from the desire of every Catholic in the country to play for Notre Dame?

Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the ''midlevel schools'' in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech's numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation's highest scoring offense. Mike Leach had become the Texas Tech head coach before the 2000 season, and from that moment its quarterbacks were transformed into superstars. In Leach's first three seasons, he played a quarterback, Kliff Kingsbury, who wound up passing for more yards than all but three quarterbacks in the history of major college football. When Kingsbury graduated (he is now with the New York Jets), he was replaced by a fifth-year senior named B.J. Symons, who threw 52 touchdown passes and set a single-season college record for passing yards (5,833). The next year, Symons graduated and was succeeded by another senior -- like Symons, a fifth-year senior, meaning he had sat out a season. The new quarterback, who had seldom played at Tech before then, was Sonny Cumbie, and Cumbie's 4,742 passing yards in 2004 was the sixth-best year in N.C.A.A. history.

Correction: December 18, 2005, Sunday
An article on Dec. 4 about Texas Tech Coach Mike Leach misidentified the hand signal used by fans of the University of Texas Longhorns in a sign to suggest their bovinity. It is the index finger and the pinkie, not the thumb and the pinkie.